


The Fairy Queen's Promise

by La Reine Noire (lareinenoire)



Category: Maleficent (2014)
Genre: Gen, Misses Clause Challenge, Missing Scenes, POV Multiple, Pre-Canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-12-20
Updated: 2014-12-20
Packaged: 2018-03-02 11:51:16
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,525
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2811023
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lareinenoire/pseuds/La%20Reine%20Noire
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>How the war for the Moors truly began.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Fairy Queen's Promise

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Yalu](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Yalu/gifts).



> Set (mostly) before the film begins. So many thousands of thanks to G. for beta-reading and handholding.

_i. Leila_

 

Only madmen and traitors went to the Moors. Everybody knew that.

 

It was forbidden by order of the king for any of his loyal subjects to venture past those great stones that marked the border. Leila knew why, as everyone did. The Moors would consume you, eat you alive from the inside. They'd seen it with their own eyes.

 

But it hadn't always been that way.

 

Leila still remembered, dimly, when the only stories about the Moors were farmers' tales from the borderlands of pixies stealing milk or the occasional traveller who happened upon a fairy ring and awakened three days later with only vague memories of what had passed. There had been wars in the past, of course, but those were ancient history, the stuff of children's stories or old treatises. She had even received an official gift from the Protector of the Moors at her christening—it was a longstanding tradition, even during those times when the kingdoms had been at war. Leila still recalled her mother, seven months gone with child, sending an envoy to the Moors to announce the imminent arrival of another heir. _The Moors are our neighbours, Leila, and powerful allies if we can keep them_.

 

A few days after the christening, however, Queen Elinor died and the sickly prince lived two fitful months before following her. They had only scarcely buried her—or so it seemed to Leila—when the king's advisors began to speak of remarriage. _God forbid, but if you were to die, sire, what would happen?_ Leila waited for her father to defend her, his only daughter who looked so like the queen he mourned, but the king merely nodded.

 

Only after the council took their leave did the king finally turn back to Leila. "I cannot help what you are, child. I need a son to rule after me."

 

"But why?"

 

The Kingdom of the Moors had neither king nor queen but a Protector, who called upon the fairy realm's own power to defend it. Florissant was her name, and she had given little William a gift that only made sense in light of what came after—she'd wished him the sweetest of dreams. Leila's clearest memory of her was of a pair of massive green-feathered wings and a woman's face crowned with twisting black horns.

 

"It's the Moors, child. Did you not see how your brother sickened and died after that _creature_ touched him at his christening?" King Henry shook his head, and Leila wondered if what she saw was the glint of tears in the corners of his eyes. "It was your mother's wish and I granted it, more fool I. She was a good woman, Leila. _Too_ good. Those filthy elves took advantage of her."

 

When the Protector of the Moors arrived at the castle gates the next day to pay her respects to the dead queen's bier, the guards refused her entry. From her chamber window far above, Leila watched as Florissant's great wings carried her higher and higher, until she hovered right at the level of Leila's eyes.

 

"You have her look," said Florissant. Her eyes were the bright green of summer grass, her face narrow and angular. The horns gleamed in the sunrise—not black, as she'd thought, but the darkest shade of green Leila could imagine, like the woods that marked the border between her father's kingdom and the Moors. "My daughter takes after her father."

 

"You have a daughter?" Leila asked, curious despite herself. Her mother had told her, smiling ruefully, that Florissant's christening gift to her had been curiosity. _Dauntless curiosity; when answers you seek, answers you shall find. I confess it was not a gift I appreciated at the time, and your father not at all_. "What's her name?"

 

"Maleficent," said the fairy, inclining her head a little. "She will be Protector after me."

 

Leila's heart twisted at the quiet authority in Florissant's voice. "My father says I can't be queen after him. He says he needs a son."

 

Florissant tilted her head to one side, frowning. "Your father thinks highly of his opinions. Too highly, perhaps. It may be time to teach him a lesson." The wings barely seemed to move as she hovered, one hand outstretched to Leila, a green feather between her fingers. "Should you ever be in need of help from the Moors, Elinor's child, you may find it by this. Do not forget."

 

As Leila clutched the feather hard against her chest, the fairy soared off into the distance. She told no one of the token, even when her father decided on his bride and the castle hummed with preparation for the royal wedding.

 

She was a renowned beauty, the lady Constance, with hair the colour of fresh honey and eyes like the summer sky, though her name proved ironic. Once again the envoys from the Moors requested entry to the wedding festivities and once again the king refused them. As she watched her father dispatch his castellan to order the envoys away, Leila thought about the bright green feather carefully hidden in a casket with several jewels that had once been her mother's, but she kept her eyes downturned and said nothing.

 

In the darkest watches of the night, a cry arose from the royal bedchamber. The newly-wedded bride had disappeared without a trace save for a single open window, far too high in the walls for a woman to escape...unless she had wings.

 

The king would have mustered his armies immediately and marched on the Moors, save that his advisors reminded him that he had no proof. So instead he sent out search parties, combing the countryside for his missing wife. Without warning, one morning six months later, the lady Constance was found near the border of the Moors, speaking nonsense and great with child.

 

King Henry swore on his honour that the child could not be his and locked his wife in one of the castle's highest towers until the birth. For her safety, he claimed. But Leila, who crept up the stairs once or twice, saw the tiny room in which she was confined and knew it was a prison. Though she brought her stepmother books and needlework to pass the time at first, Lady Constance only ever sat by the window, her eyes fixed on the distant peaks of the Moors.

 

She gave birth to a boy on a cold autumn day, and the king had him sent away to live with a farmer and his wife near the border of the Moors, perhaps assuming that the child's father, whoever he was, might come to claim him. As for his unfortunate mother, the lady Constance, married two years but never crowned, she pined for the moors until one night the bars on her chamber window mysteriously disappeared and she plunged from the casement.

 

King Henry had her buried as befit her rank and family, and the bishop made no mention of the scandal she'd unwittingly caused. Even as his soldiers massed in the fields below the castle, the king was deep in conference with wizards and warlocks, men who worked only in darkness, to bring down Florissant once and for all.

 

He all but forgot that he had a daughter, so consumed was he with vengeance. But Leila watched and learned all the same, tucking scraps of knowledge away and wondering if it would ever make sense.

 

The king eventually discovered that Florissant made her home on the northern border of the Moors, hard by the kingdom of Alsted. Two of his warlocks found some of the weaker-willed wights from within the Moors and lured them with promises to show them the way in. Leila never knew exactly what happened, but they returned to the palace, pale and shaking, one of them bearing Florissant's head, her green eyes wide and shocked, her mouth forever stopped mid-cry. Unlike the other traitors' heads on the parapet, however, hers did not fester and rot. Florissant stared in silent accusation for weeks until one night Leila, with the help of a guard to whom she paid several pieces of gold in silence, took down the head and buried it in a far corner of the garden.

 

"She never did anything wrong," Leila told the mound of dirt after she'd finished. "If you wanted to punish my father, you should have hurt _him_." She remembered the last time she'd seen Lady Constance, singing softly to herself and to the imaginary child she cradled in her arms. Remembered too the morning that Florissant had spoken to her and what she'd confessed. "If you truly did all this for me, maybe you were as wicked as he says."

 

She wondered too, as she gazed through the darkness toward the Moors, about Florissant's daughter, meant to inherit the protectorship. With the disaster of her father's remarriage, Leila too was poised to claim a crown, though nobody spoke of that.

 

Instead they waited for the Moors' revenge and it did not come. The borders fell silent, but it was a brooding, watchful silence. King Henry's armies slowly dispersed, though the armourers continued working and the guards trained every day in the courtyard. The king's laws deemed it treason for any subject to attempt to enter the Moors, and the single road that linked the two kingdoms was put under permanent guard.

 

The reckoning would come sooner or later, Leila knew. The green feather waited at the bottom of her jewel casket.

 

When the Moors' revenge came, she would be ready.

 

 

_ii. Stefan_

 

All bastards were liars. Everyone knew that.

 

Or so they'd told Stefan since he was old enough to understand the words. Of his mother he knew nothing, save that she was a harlot and had died for her sins; and of his father he knew even less than that.

 

Twice a year a man on a great roan stallion stopped at the farm and handed the farmer a bag of gold. "For the bastard," he'd say, smirking at Stefan.

 

One year, he finally got a closer look at the bag and saw the symbol picked out in golden thread. The leather was soft to the touch, finer than anything he'd ever seen. He learned as he grew older that it was the royal crest, from the castle whose outlines he could just barely see on the horizon. What it meant, he could only guess, but Stefan found himself gazing at the castle more often, wondering what connection there might be between himself and it.

 

To look in the other direction was to find something as magnificent, but much closer. The farm sat within a stone's throw of the border between their land and the unknown Moors, a realm of goblins, dragons and faeries. Just beyond the low stone wall that marked the edge of the farm was a field where the sheep would sometimes graze when one of the children could be spared to watch them, and beyond that a massive forest, so thick that even in winter they couldn't see to the other side. Massive stone blocks with carved faces—crude to Stefan's eye—stared out at miles upon miles of fertile farmland and hills teeming with herds of sheep—the lifeblood of the realm in more ways than one.

 

Every day, Stefan thought about leaving the sheep and venturing into the woods. It was treason to cross the borders into the Moors and everyone knew the stories about those who crossed to the other side and never returned. Or worse, the ones who came back changed, hollow shells of themselves. He made it as far as the statues at least half a dozen times before one day in high summer, he gritted his teeth and took one step past them.

 

Nothing happened. No thunder and lightning, no horns to summon any guards. Only the stillness of the woods around him, alive with birdsong.

 

When he glanced over his shoulder, he could still see the fields and his flock, cheerfully unaware of the transgression he'd just committed. _I have broken the law_. For even this tiny step into the Moors, the king could have him condemned for a traitor and strung up alongside thieves and murderers.

 

Turning his back on them all, Stefan took one step and then another. The sun glinted through the leaves, marking out a vague path through the trees. Within a few moments, Stefan could see nothing but forest. Ignoring the coil of fear in his belly, he kept walking. The air began to smell different, though he couldn't entirely explain why or how, and the birdsong seemed to weave together into complicated patterns that he'd never heard before.

 

When he stumbled through a curtain of willow branches and found himself staring down at a pool whose floor gleamed with countless sparkling gems, Stefan could scarce believe his eyes. Kneeling beside the pool, he reached into the water and scooped up a single silvery stone and gazed down at it. It _felt_ real—and he, like everyone else, had heard of the legendary wealth of the Moors. How wealthy could a place be, he wondered, if jewels could be found in mere ponds?

 

How long he knelt there he didn't know, before he was discovered. The voice commanding his presence was a girl's, he could have sworn. She sounded no older than Stefan, but there was something beneath the words that demanded obedience.

 

Her name, he soon learned, was Maleficent, and she was, by turns, the most fascinating and the most infuriating creature Stefan had ever encountered.

 

Ruler of the Moors in all but name, Maleficent wore her power lightly, without question or pause, and her word was law to every strange being that resided within those invisible walls. And when he was with her, he could pretend that they bowed to him, obeyed him just as they did her. It was almost as intoxicating as the Moors themselves, where the colours were always brighter, the birdsong more tuneful, and the fruits infinitely sweeter. Every time he returned to the farm, it was as though yet another invisible thread followed him, binding him ever more to the Moors and all its possibilities.

 

He told no one of his incursions, at least not at first. Then, a week after his fifteenth birthday, the messenger from the palace made his customary visit, and this time Stefan spoke to him, asking idly about the palace and the king.

 

"The king will go to war against the kingdom of the Moors before year's end," said the messenger, tossing the small bag of gold idly from hand to hand. "You should go for a soldier, bastard boy. It's a good trade."

 

"I'd rather go to the castle," said Stefan.

 

"Bold words, bastard."

 

"My name is Stefan."

 

"You're a bastard boy, whatever your bloody name is. But if it's the palace you want," he said after a moment, "I could see about finding you a place in the servants' quarters. If you've got something worthwhile in return."

 

"You can tell the king that the Moors can't be conquered like any other kingdom." He took a breath before speaking again. "I've been there."

 

The messenger stared at him for a moment before swinging down from the horse quick as a swooping hawk. He grabbed Stefan's tunic. "A treasonous bastard, no less. You know the punishment for crossing the border?"

 

"I can tell you about them. I can tell the king--"

 

"You'll tell the king nothing, bastard boy." He narrowed his eyes. "But you'll tell me what you know. And perhaps I'll come back next month for you."

 

Stefan told him of the guards of the moors with their hideous, tree-like faces and their massive claws, of the pixies and goblins and their magic, but he couldn't bring himself to speak of Maleficent. He'd kissed her for the first time just a few weeks before, speaking words he'd heard the farmer's wife speak when telling tales of fairies and princesses. _True Love's Kiss_ , she'd called it. Maleficent's blush had been worth his stammering attempt, and the kiss had been far sweeter than he'd expected.

 

"There was a queen of the Moors once," said the messenger, "but she betrayed the king and he took her head."

 

All Maleficent had told him was that her parents were dead. Of course, all Stefan had told her was the same. Perhaps she was as much a liar as he was, bastard or otherwise. And yet, he held his tongue, hoping what he did speak would be enough to get him past the castle gates.

 

As it turned out, it did. The messenger didn't wait another month—he hoisted Stefan onto the back of his horse and rode with him to the massive hill on which the castle perched, its great crenellated towers casting shadows for miles around.

 

He never saw the farm again.

 

 

_iii. Maleficent_

 

The wind was bitterly cold at the peak of the Forbidden Mountain, but Maleficent scarcely noticed. Once she might have taken to the air, traced every whorl and eddy and followed the current into the clouds—even now, her very skin ached for it.

 

Reaching up over her shoulder, she traced the tender scars now marring her back. The worst was that she could still _feel_ her wings, as though some strange, insubstantial thread lingered yet, throbbing every so often to remind her. As though she could forget. She was Protector of the Moors and her memory was prodigious, just as her mother's had been.

 

More importantly, she never forgot her enemies, or the enemies of the Moors. Stefan—that dog, that beast, that creature of mud and offal—was now implacably both.

 

She should have known never to trust humans.

 

It was humans, after all, who had killed her mother and reduced the fairest palace in the Moors to ruins—blighted the very land on which it stood. They had been invited into the Moors by the Lady Florissant herself as envoys from the human king before turning iron upon her and setting the palace ablaze with some strange concoction that consumed whatever it touched in flame. Maleficent herself only escaped by chance, having chosen to spend that night in the tree that had afterward become her home.

 

Nobody had ever told Maleficent why, save that it was part of the war that had raged so long between the humans and the Moors.

 

She should have known.

 

Stefan had been different. She'd told herself that he was different, and truly he'd _smelled_ different from other humans. All she knew of his parents were that they were dead and she hadn't thought to ask if either of them had come from the Moors. Otherwise, after all, he couldn't have entered without permission.

 

She could sense Diaval long before he arrived within the confines of the Forbidden Mountain. And somehow, even before he spoke, she knew what had happened.

 

"He did _this_ to me so he would be king," Maleficent finally said, the words tasting like ashes in her mouth. The staff in her hand glowed bright and ferocious, and she threw back her head with a roar of rage drawn from deep within the Moors itself.

 

When she came back to the world, Diaval was still there, his head cocked birdlike even in human form.

 

"What now, mistress?"

 

What now, indeed.

 

Maleficent knew the answer.

 

_iv. Leila_

 

After the christening, while her husband raged and messengers rode the length and breadth of the realm to seize hundreds of thousands of spinning wheels, Leila slipped through one of the castle's countless secret doors and rode to the border of the Moors.

 

Maleficent was waiting. Neither she nor Leila bowed.

 

Leila drew forth the feather from Florissant's wings and watched as the fairy flinched.

 

"Your mother once killed an innocent woman to spite my father. Will you do the same for Stefan? Or will you help me protect my daughter and make peace between these our kingdoms?"

 

Maleficent's eyes were lighter than her mother's, her face impossibly beautiful. She had no wings, of course. _My husband ripped them from her while she slept_. Leila's stomach roiled for a second.

 

"I know what my husband did to you. I know you cannot forgive him. But our daughter is innocent. Lift your curse."

 

Maleficent shrugged. "And what if I can't?"

 

"Protect her, then." Leila held out the feather. "Protect Aurora. I call upon your mother's promise, Maleficent of the Moors. Watch over my daughter."

 

"It is from Stefan that she needs the most protection," said the fairy coldly.

 

"That's what I ask. He wants to hide her in the countryside, far from the castle. I cannot protect her there, but you can."

 

"And in return?"

"In return I promise you peace. My husband may rage all he likes, but without my consent he will never field an army against the Moors. On that you have my word."

 

In an icy blast of wind, the feather was snatched from her hand and Maleficent disappeared.

 

Leila turned slowly and made her way back to the castle.

**Author's Note:**

> I jumped on this prompt like candy because I found Maleficent such an interesting-yet-frustrating film. There were so many questions raised and never answered, and they made no use of a character I saw as pivotal to the story: Aurora's mother, whose name was never mentioned during the film but identified in the credits as Leila. So I've taken more than a bit of poetic license with her portion of the story, although I don't feel that anything I've done here expressly contradicts what we see in the film.
> 
> I've made a few assumptions about how the protectorship of the Moors works since it's never explained in the film. We know that Maleficent is the strongest of the fairies and that the protectorship falls to her when she's old enough, but there's no indication of whether this is hereditary or whether she's elected. I'm assuming a bit of both, and that Maleficent's mother was Protector of the Moors before her. I'm also embroidering a little to explain what the Forbidden Mountain once was, what happened to it, and how Maleficent's mother died.


End file.
